Vault - Flash Fiction

Once we were gymnasts. Vaulting, tumbling and scissoring. Our bodies soaring, in defiance of gravity’s leadenness. Each was the other’s asymmetric bar containing their flight. Soft landings and angular handholds. Tucking, twisting and pivoting around each’s axis. Contrapuntal convolutions consummately confluent. Heads over heels over hips and all manna in between.

But eventually our mutual routines became routine. Repetitive, rehearsed, rehashed and rote. We became arrhythmic. Hand supination taken for supplication. We floored one another. Me with my fabric ribbons, you with sports ball. You wanted to club me, while I wanted you hanging at the end of a rope. And not even inverted. Each V-sitting at extreme opposite edges of the parallel bars to keep one another at legs' width. Our anatomies reasserted their asymmetricalness to one another on the bars, on the few occasions we made hate, our bodies clashed and collided rather than being cushioned. We flic-flac'd past one another in avoidance. You pommel horsed me, swinging round to keep me at bay or slice me in two. While I lost my balance when straddling the narrow beam of you. The white spray taking leave from your hands was not chalk dust. We stuck the dismount on one another.

Pin Cushion Heart - Flash Fiction

He pinned her to his chest. She snipped his grip with her long nails digging into his flesh and unstitched herself from his embrace. As she did so, he threaded his arms around her flanks and reeled her back in. He tilted his head to whisper directly in her ear and broached the subject of marriage. She scissored through his clasp and sewed herself to the wall where he would not be able to cincture her again. He extended his arms towards her “You seem stressed my darling”. She crossed stitched her arms to make a straitjacket of herself.  “Oh really, do I? Maybe because a man who embroiders everything that comes out of his mouth with promises he has no intention of keeping, just proposed marriage to me“. Darn it Rita!” “Oh put a sock in it Serge! You’re a thimblerigger of the first order”. “Look, I admit I may have dropped the odd stitch in my time, but you’ve changed me. Sewn up the emptiness that was deep within me. You’ve opened up this nit-wit’s clamshell and discovered the purl inside”. “Stop layering it on so thick. There is nothing that can selvage this relationship”. “Not even this ring?” He tried to lace her finger through it, but was unable to thread the eye of this particular clenched needle. Now it was his nails driving into her flesh. “Stop needling me!” “Me needling you Rita? You’ve made a pin-cushion of my heart”